Literary reviews by Tim Love.Warning: Rather than reviews, these are often notes in preparation for reviews that were never finished, or pleas for help with understanding pieces. See Litref Reviews - a rationale for details.

Wednesday, 7 June 2017

"Stations of the Boar" by Kevin Mills (Cinnamon Press, 2016)

A 17 page pamphlet, "Re-reading Lifris' Life of Saint Cadoc (c.1086)". According to the back cover these poems "interrogate how the presence of the past constructs a nearly hallucinatory sense of what it might mean to be Welsh". I'm struggling with the content and expression. Here's the start of "Prints"

I'll raise, perhaps, a chap-
el here for Finnian whose faith

could harness forest harts and
keep our book uninjured by the

pelting

The syllable count for all the lines of the poem is 6,8, 7,8, 6,8, 6,5, 6,5. I can't see much of a pattern there. Perhaps the idea of raising a chap is why the first line's broken. It's iambic, but some lines have more than 3 beats.

The final poem ends with a flurry of line-breaks - "The angel says I// must forgive you./ Enough for now.// May the land/ rise to meet/ you."